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Infants in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) are particularly susceptible to infection, leading to high rates of initiation of empiric antibiotics, as well as lengthy antibiotic courses, sometimes without clear indication. Antibiotic stewardship efforts are focusing on establishing criteria for antibiotic initiation and recommendations for discontinuing antibiotics when infection is unproven.
In the current follow-up to a retrospective cohort study that demonstrated wide variability in antibiotic use rates across approximately 130 NICUs in California in 2013, researchers examined how those rates changed between 2013 and 2016. They also assessed possible drivers of antibiotic use variability (e.g., proven infection incidence, participatio…